Someone's going to have to provide me with an explainer of how many different proxy forces are involved in Yemen. I can barely keep up with Lebanon and have forgotten Syria.
Someone's going to have to provide me with an explainer of how many different proxy forces are involved in Yemen. I can barely keep up with Lebanon and have forgotten Syria.
> an explainer of how many different proxy forces are involved in Yemen
RealLifeLore has been doing a decent job covering it [1].
The broad summary is you have the Saudi-backed unity government, the Iranian-backed Houthis, who claim all of Yemen but practically want North Yemen, and the UAE-backed STC, who also claim all of Yemen but practically want South Yemen. Emiratis bring the Israelis to the party. The Iranians bring the Russians. The Saudis bring various international elements (I know less about them than the Houthis and STC).
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IgD7zmJN3_A&pp=0gcJCVACo7VqN5t...
Johnny Harris has a pretty decent video on the topic as well
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsO-rULEfrk
Johnny Harris is astoundingly wrong about most things, so I'll skip it thanks
Years ago I had found his channel and liked it, and then some video (I don’t remember the title or even subject at this time) came up on a subject I happened to know quite a bit about. He got to some point in an explanation, bungled it, and then hand-waved it away, saying the details were unimportant.
Stopped caring about anything he had to say after that, and I also then realized that there was a an entire genre of “person with no actual expertise reads Wikipedia articles and explains them with good lighting and high production quality.”
And you'll see the exact same thing here on HN.
Comments here should be read as opinions, not as facts. I see it every time there is a subject I know deeply about, 90%+ of the comments are either factually incorrect or just bad opinions.
Same. It was the "How The U.S. Ruined Bread" video for me after which I started watching critically and found the editing style to be over the top and makes it harder to think about the content while it's being presented. So I eventually stopped watching.
Interesting. I had a similar experience with Veritasium’s video on kinetic bombardment, where I think they dismissed the concept based on tossing bowling balls out of helicopters onto sandcastles.
Try Sarah Pain for middle/eastern history.
Do you have a reputable sources to back up your claims here? Johnny cites sources pretty consistently.
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking-health-a...
> The quick cuts and dazzling montages, as well as the dramatic shots of Harris absorbed by a document he’s unearthed, highlighting it suspensefully in tight close-ups, all lend credence to the often-excellent work he does. But it also makes it easy to mask his mistakes. And for someone who takes journalism to heart, his mistakes are big, leading to oversimplification and an occasional lapse in skepticism.
[...]
> In a video that garnered 8.5 million views and which Harris thumbnailed with the words “WE HAVE PROOF,” Harris explores the recent craze over UFO sightings—sorry, UAP sightings, meaning unexplained anomalous phenomena. In passing, he mentions Mick West, who has done excellent work debunking a lot of blurry footage of what is alleged to be high-tech spy drones or aliens.
> But the bulk of the video is spent leering at report after report—a total of 144 are being investigated by the U.S. government right now!—while original music amps up the mystery. The emphasis on evidence over context is key to Harris’ style: flood the space with visuals that keep your attention and elicit questions and only occasionally pull back to explain.
Most things? That's a really strong claim, do you have anything to back it up with? Just a couple videos here and there wouldn't cut it, given how strong your claim is.
For what it's worth I watch his videos and he seems to touch on incredibly valuable topics I would never hear about otherwise, like [1].
[1] https://youtu.be/2tuS1LLOcsI?si=b3mS0meBazL0RlcS
STC was defeated after a Saudi bombing campaign, and their independent nation quashed. While there might be holdouts here and there, they are a non-entity now.
Quite impressive how they folded. UAE bluff was called spectacularly and I think that, in the future, looking back, that event might mark the beginning of the end of their geopolitical ambitions.
> that event might mark the beginning of the end of their geopolitical ambitions.
i hope so, they have been one of the biggest sources of discord in the Middle East, funding civil wars in Libya, Sudan, Yemen, funding a coup in Egypt.
Best of luck! These proxy wars have existed since the days of Assyria. 3000 years and running.
Kind of depressing thought actually.
> Kind of depressing thought actually
I gotchu: https://youtu.be/-evIyrrjTTY ("This Land is Mine", 3 min)
Finally, a history video I fully understand
Brilliant video. Thank you.
I tried to make sense of middle eastern politics once. My conclusion has been „It’s complicated.“
Reminds me of this (by now completely outdated) middle east friendship chart I once came across.
[0]: https://www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2014/07/17/the_middle...
I'd go to you for information before I'd go to the people who say, "It's really all pretty simple..."
Yes - but complicated by what.
Not really there are time of instability but large stretches of stable government usually under a single empire the Persians, Rome, Caliphs and then Ottomans. The current shit show is due to a western induced collapse of the ottomans and then western powers ensuring no single nation can once again enforce that stability.
>Not really there are time of instability but large stretches of stable government usually under a single empire the Persians, Rome, Caliphs and then Ottomans.
The Gulf countries now are in a far better condition than they were under the Ottomans (and than modern Turkey). "Stability" is what led the Ottoman Empire to devolve into a backwards, economically undeveloped society that was incapable of competing with the west.
Lots of things have existed throughout history, yet we have overcome them in the last few hundred years. There is peace in Europe (west of Russia) which had as ancient conflict as Yemen; there is democracy, freedom, women have equal rights in much of the world, starvation and many diseases are mostly overcome, warfare is very rare and not an omnipresent threat, ...
Thank goodness our predecessors didn't think this way. They thought that through reason, hard word, and humanism they could overcome these things, and they did. No doubt there were plenty of naysayers.
What will we do with our turn?
I wouldn't get too complacent about peace in Europe. The peace in the last 80 years or so was the result of very specific conditions that no longer apply.
The EU is at heart the European peace project, and it very much still applies.
I think your assessment of whatever the "specific condition" is, is wrong.
Lately, sure. But for most of that time the threat from the Soviet Union was the heart of the European peace project. Without the USSR the fractures in the EU look to be getting more serious, at least from the outside. Russia's invasion of Ukraine will probably save either the EU or NATO, but probably not both.
Odd take, as the EU was founded as a peace project (1) and external threats of invasion obviously are not. But please, no more of these idiosyncratic opinions.
1) source, 1950: https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor...
While I commend the positive attitude and I tend to have a positive view on the trajectory of humanity.
This part of the planet has been almost intractable since the age of Hammurabi - it is quite fractured without any current overarching unity or framework. There isn't a dominant religion (similar to Europe) or shared values. I could say almost meaningless things like "thought that through reason, hard word, and humanism they could overcome these things" which would make little of the hard truths of the long histories of the varied peoples and fractions of the area.
It would almost seem naive to say things like because we've solved some tough problems in the last century we can solve all problems.
I think you gloss over much and certainly give yourself a mightier than thou feeling with your "Thank goodness our predecessors didn't think this way".
I too hope for peaceful resolution and stability but fall back to the historic record of success especially in a place that is constantly, recently and historically decimated by war among fiefdoms.
Europe didn’t have a common religion after the Reformation (at least not in the sense people who lived there at the time would recognise).
In fact it was wars with a strong religious element between Protestant and catholic factions that tore Europe apart for centuries afterwards
Europe didn't have a common religion before the reformation as well. There were literal crusades inside Europe including against other christians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Crusades
No dominant religion in the Middle East? Haha!
The reason is fractured is because of the inherent tribalism within the cultures of the region. Strip away the tribalism (Oman, Qatar, UAE to an extent), concentrate the people near a few cities (Egypt), or provide them a unifying overarching culture (Iran, Turkey), and you get some success. In fact, the early Islamic empires were heavily mired in infighting even though they were "unified" under the Caliphate, in spite of the Prophet's calls for the "Ummah" (One Islamic Nation). I would even argue that Islam's biggest contribution to the region was in providing a specific administrative framework with which to shed the tribal infighting and unite culturally similar but disparate peoples together. It's also why Israel succeeded as a nation with its European flavor of nation-state identity.
An Israeli intelligence officer perhaps correctly attributed it to the past culture of water scarcity and needing to protect your water sources. That is, in the desert, there are only so many sources of water, and if someone steals it away from you, you simply die. So that created a culture of inherent suspicion of outsiders and people outside the clan, even though they all share the same customs and culture.
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I think there are only 3. Houthis (iran), PLC (saudi), and STC (UAE).
I guess Al-Qaeda and Isis are also there.
On whose side is Turkey? Or is it charting its own path?
Turkey’s main goal is preventing the establishment of a Kurdish state for fear of losing it’s Kurdish region.
It’s doing its own thing, mainly in Syria, Libya, and Somalia afaik.
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No it doesn't.
In the Middle East everyone fights with everyone else and everyone is in covert or open alliance with everyone else. Simultaneously.
Arab Bedouin saying:
"I and my brother against my cousin, and I and my cousin against the stranger."
And for extra fun, the U.S. sometimes likes to jump into the fray.
The US is more of a bouncer on behalf of Israel than anything else, really.
-- Moshe, why are you keep reading anti-Semitic papers? -- I just like to hear how powerful and clever we are.
Defense of Israel was the primary justification offered in a recent State department memo asserting the legal basis for the war with Iran. Unusually, its publication was not announced on social media or to the press, unlike most state department official pronouncements. Anyway, rather than being opinion, this is (for the present) the official position of the United States government.
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-legal-adviser/2...
> Defense of Israel was the primary justification offered in a recent State department memo asserting the legal basis for the war with Iran.
It's funnier than that. The justification is "self-defense of its [the USA's] Israeli ally".
Sometimes?
Every ~10 year or so. As opposed to the locals who experience it daily, either war or the conflicts-between-wars.
The US has been doing air strikes in the Middle East on a regular basis since ~1990, and they extensively support the military adventures of allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia.